- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- gaming@beehaw.org
- games@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- games@sh.itjust.works
- gaming@beehaw.org
- games@hexbear.net
A three-year fight to help support game preservation has come to a sad end today. The US copyright office has denied a request for a DMCA exemption that would allow libraries to remotely share digital access to preserved video games.
“For the past three years, the Video Game History Foundation has been supporting with the Software Preservation Network (SPN) on a petition to allow libraries and archives to remotely share digital access to out-of-print video games in their collections,” VGHF explains in its statement. “Under the current anti-circumvention rules in Section 1201 of the DMCA, libraries and archives are unable to break copy protection on games in order to make them remotely accessible to researchers.”
Essentially, this exemption would open up the possibility of a digital library where historians and researchers could ‘check out’ digital games that run through emulators. The VGHF argues that around 87% of all video games released in the US before 2010 are now out of print, and the only legal way to access those games now is through the occasionally exorbitant prices and often failing hardware that defines the retro gaming market.
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Love how the people don’t get represented or supported because of corporations and their insatiable greed.
The weird thing is, corporations can’t even make any money from these older games. I guess they think that means people who can’t play older games will just buy their newer garbage, and yet that’s not how it works at all lol people just end up buying indie games instead these days.
It’s about preserving the consumption culture for the mainstream. If playing older games for free was easier and legal, more people that now only play the newest AAA garbage would start doing it, and corpos don’t want to risk that culture change, because if it gets big enough it would definitely impact their sales.
Unfortunately not many people know or care about indie games and free games like Beyond All Reason, Shattered Pixel Dungeon, etc. as is.
They could and sometimes make a relatively small amount of money, but it’s more about trying to legally protect their trademarks/intellectual property as I understand it. These days I’d much rather support an indie dev over a shitty “AAA” company for sure, tired of them price gouging people for games that aren’t even that good.
They can dick about as much as they want, piracy will make sure to preserve the things they want gone. The reason they don’t want older games to be preserved is that new generations, whilst playing them, may come to realize that you don’t need gacha mechanics, stupid fomo, micro transactions, 6 different currencies, 3 different shop menus, 2 battlepasses and so forth to have a good game.
Imagine Beethoven refusing to release his catalog of works because people might stop listening to newer music. Gg capitalism.
Someone’s got to do something about these fucking chicken shit publishers. I think it’s time for the industry to move on without them. Everything can be self published now. We have the technology.
God forbid we… checks notes preserve games so we can play them?
I don’t think I’ll ever buy a game from a AAA publisher again,they can’t be trusted and the quality of their goods has fallen sharply the last few years.
Smaller dev teams have better/more interesting IP AND seem to care what I think as their end user.
🐶 NO PLAY
🐶 ONLY BUY
How dare people use games for recreation! Why would they not think about the shareholders!
I guess people rent movies and books because they hate them!
They’re right though. Those archived games would definitely be played… For fun. The problem is that even though the graphics aren’t as good, a lot of older games were fun and had great replayability. Eventually, there will be such a big historical catalog of games that people will be able to enjoy just legacy games without ever buying new ones.
The solution is simple: have some non-profit org manage the historical catalog, sell the old games super cheap, and send that way whoever holds the rights can still get profits off the old games. They could even give you different download options like game-only, or game in a VM that is guaranteed to actually be able to run the game.
Guess I’ll have to start hoarding games now
🏴☠️
Well, time to finally make my own collection to play
That’s what I’ve been doing. Been collecting various PS1-4 games on top of GameCube, Wii, and Switch games over the past year to rip and save digital copies for myself. Then I play them on emulators.
I have roughly a few hundred so far and plan to expand it further.
I have a NAS with two 8 TB drives in RAID to back them up and it’s already over 50% full. I want to start collecting OG Xbox and 360 games in the near future, but I need to get jailbroken consoles for them.two 8 TB drives in RAID to back them up
Obligatory “RAID is not a backup”
Sure, but it’s a start. It’s certainly better than trying to keep them on my laptop. And I do hope to add more forms of data backup/storage as time goes on. It’s taken several hours ripping all those games and I’d hate to lose them all.
I also have an external 4 TB SSD that I keep most of the games on (excluding the PS4 games because they simply take up too much space).Make a torrent, best backup.
the plastic cases dont need preserving, just the data.
“No! They’ll enjoy preserving our history to muuuch!!”
They know the dark secret of book preservation. The people preserving the books… gulp READ THEM!
Libraries facilitate widespread piracy of books, by allowing people to read them without a distribution licence, or even take them home!
This is a clear violation of the DMCA, and thus must be stopped immediately!
I get the sarcasm even if others don’t.
Someone else on Lemmy said you couldn’t invent libraries today. It’s true.
Actually explains a lot of decisions by game publishers the last 5-10 years if their official position is that games are meant to collect dust on a shelf rather than being played.
You can’t have criticisms about the game if you put it on a shelf instead of playing it.
